Tectonic hazards/Shake-table

Shake-table in earthquake engineering is a very effective experimental equipment to verify seismic performance associated with the direct damage to individual buildings or their models under specified ground shaking. The best way to do it is to put a building structure on a shake-table that simulates the earth shaking and to watch what may happen next (if you have no time to stand out in the field and wait for a real earthquake to strike). The earliest shake-table experiments were performed more than a century ago [1]

Modern shake-tables typically consist of a rectangular platform that is driven in up to six degrees of freedom (DOF) by servo-hydraulic or other types of actuators. Test specimens are fixed to the platform and shaken, often to the point of failure.